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Retro Weather Channel

This is brilliant! I only wish it was streaming the smooth jazz instead of playing the same song and resetting. I spent a lot of hours in the 1990s with TWC as background music.
Here's 8 hours of weather jazz for everyone's enjoyment.
 
Awesome!

It would be neat and convenient for a cable company to fill a vacant channel number (preferably on the 2-22 ish range basic service) with the continous RetroCast site.

Does anyone have the link (if it still exists) to a similar Retrocast site, this time using TWC's Weatherscan channel? I thought I'd seen that link in the past but cannot find it.
 
Recently came across the Retrocast web site by the Weather Channel. It's your local forecast that has the look of a 1990s WeatherStar system, complete with a smooth jazz soundtrack.
Just tap "start retrocast" and then the green sound icon in the bottom right if you want music.

RetroCast Now
Does anyone recognize the name and composer of the background jazz music on the retrocast? Is it anything from Trammel Scott?
 
You want retro cable TV weather? Well, THIS is retro cable TV weather! I remember seeing a channel like this on a cable TV system in the 70s when I was a kid visiting family in SE Iowa. I lived in an urban area (with easy OTA reception) so we didn't have cable... so this seemed pretty cool at the time.

 
The superpowers of the nerds who've congregated around reverse engineering and re-animating all those old WeatherSTAR cable headend boxes is fascinating. There are videos all over Youtube of their emulations (not simulations). These simulations, though, are equally fun to see.

Years back, a separate group of turbonerds (with some crossover into the WeatherSTAR community) got their hands on several versions of the old Prevue Guide software and began reverse engineering it as well ... with similar results.

7.3.13.png

They went so far as creating a dedicated web forum and wiki to function as gathering places for the dissection and resurrection of the software (https://ariweinstein.com/prevue/ and https://prevueguide.com/).
 
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The superpowers of the nerds who've congregated around reverse engineering and re-animating all those old WeatherSTAR cable headend boxes is fascinating. There are videos all over Youtube of their emulations (not simulations). These simulations, though, are equally fun to see.

Years back, a separate group of turbonerds (with some crossover into the WeatherSTAR community) got their hands on several versions of the old Prevue Guide software and began reverse engineering it as well ... with similar results.

View attachment 11982

They went so far as creating a dedicated web forum and wiki to function as gathering places for the dissection and resurrection of the software (https://ariweinstein.com/prevue/ and https://prevueguide.com/).
Anyone know if there's actually an old PreVue guide simulator, based on listings for your cable system or area? Even if it takes at least 15 minutes to get through all the channels with the 4di channels in some areas (unless you can customize your listings)?
 
Anyone know if there's actually an old PreVue guide simulator, based on listings for your cable system or area? Even if it takes at least 15 minutes to get through all the channels with the 4di channels in some areas (unless you can customize your listings)?
You don't need any simulator for Prevue Guide. They have the actual software (multiple versions with different looks from various eras, in fact) and have put together a method for running it in an Amiga VM under Windows called WinUAE. Plus I believe they've assembled some tertiary software for feeding it your own listings, so the original software will actually scroll them. Check the forum link I gave. They also have a Discord where many of them hang out. You can get direct real-time assistance from them there.
 
You want retro cable TV weather? Well, THIS is retro cable TV weather! I remember seeing a channel like this on a cable TV system in the 70s when I was a kid visiting family in SE Iowa. I lived in an urban area (with easy OTA reception) so we didn't have cable... so this seemed pretty cool at the time.

I remember my local cable system in Ohio having that system. During the Blizzard of '78, for those who hadn't lost cable yet, we could watch the barometric pressure fall off the scale.
 


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